Undersheriff and former Marine Rick Trelane had one constant his entire life - his friendship with Whitney Peterson. Through thick and thin, she has never faltered. Never blamed. But when her former lover turns up dead, Rick must look past the walls he's built to the woman he thought he knew inside and out...and discover he was wrong.

Whitney has secrets, deadly ones. The deeper he digs, the more he sees her as a woman he desires. And suspects. But as bodies start turning up, so does the evidence against her. Now the air is thick with secrets and shadows and giving into the longing could turn both their worlds upside down. Because this killer is just getting started...

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Sweet Survivors

There’s a tendency in the field of story telling, to have characters who
are strong—down to the bone survivors—be hard. I mean, I get it. Every time
you’ve been through something, you have to toughen up some part of you to keep
going. And I believe that it’s the nature of scars to do that. But I know
there’s a different way. Not every person responds to stimulus the same way. To
pain, or heartache, or loss. Some folks distance themselves, refuse to put
themselves in a position to hurt that way again and in romance, we see a LOT of
those.

But there is another rare breed—the person who throws themselves back into
the fray.

Not because they’re gluttons for punishment or even because they are
masochists. Some folks out there know that the point of surviving is to keep
living. Striving to keep laughter and love and peace a part of their
hearts. We don’t see them too often on the pages of our books. I know they’re
out there though, because I’m one of them. By the time I was thirty-one, two of
my siblings had died in separate, sudden tragedies, leaving our whole family
shattered and heartbroken. It’s changed my outlook on life greatly, knowing both
of them had so much life ahead of them that they didn’t get to live. Children
they didn’t see raised. Goals they never got to achieve. To me, every day is a
gift that I refuse to let pass me by or waste with regrets. So, when it came
time to write a heroine for my battle-scarred hero in “Wanted, I knew she’d have
to be this kind of woman.

Not a Mary Sue, exactly—though that was a temptation. If anything, a Dark
Mary Sue, someone who isn’t blind to the pain or the anger at the lot life has
given her. Someone who has occasionally done the wrong thing for the right
reasons. Someone who lives in a serious gray area, but still turns her face to
the sun because she damn well chooses to.

And that’s how Whitney Peterson came about.

She’s no innocent, though everyone seems to think she is.

She’s no saint, either. In fact, she’s tired. Tired of always being the one
who has to hold it all together. And worse, do so with a smile.

But she doesn’t exactly see a way out so, she does what most of us in the
real world have done every day. She keeps going. She works her tail off, raising
a difficult teenager, keeping up her business…and hiding secrets that would
crush a lesser soul. But Whitney doesn’t see her own strength most of the time.
She just does what she has to. And I love her for that.

I wanted her to be as close to a real woman as I could make her. For her to
have those qualities that I’ve known in women I’ve admired. I wanted her to be
be courageous with her heart, real in her pain, passionate in her anger. I
wanted her to have a gun, lol. (What? She’s tough!)

In the end, Whitney became more real to me than most of my characters ever
have.

But what about you? What qualities in a heroine do you look for? What part
of you do you wish was in the heroines you read?

Dee Tenorio has a few reality issues. After much therapy for the problem—if one can call being awakened in the night by visions of hot able-bodied men a problem—she has proved incurable. It turns out she enjoys tormenting herself by writing sizzling, steamy romances of various genres spanning paranormal mystery dramas, contemporaries and romantic comedies. Preferably starring the sexy, somewhat grumpy heroes described above and smart-mouthed heroines who have much better hair than she does.

The best part is, no more therapy bills!
Well, not for Dee, anyway. Her husband and kids, on the other hand…

If you would like to learn more about Dee and her work, please peruse around this site or visit her blog at http://www.deetenorio.com/blog/.